Ubuntu’s Maroon picking up Red and Brown

Maroon text and wallpaper complements evil Orang Tang

You can see the maroon cool coming out in the text and wallpaper. Yes Maroon has a strange history and is known as a weird colour. Thankfully it brings out Ubuntu eccentricity and playfulness. Maroon works well with Orange, but both colours on their own FAIL miserably. Nobody wants to be known as the Maroon company or the Orange company, but Orange + Maroon, we can live with.

The danger however, is that we could all suddenly go Pink or Purple overnight i.e. Mauve, forgetting that it is the blacks, reds and browns which link Ubuntu to Africa. Old Mauve and Maroon have a lot in common, the former is usually associated with household decor, while the latter is a corporate standard..

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Lucid = Light = Less Relevent?

Controversial choice for new logo

While some people might associate Lucid with Clarity or Lucid as in Lucid Dreams, the folks at Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor, seem to be going a little overboard on the lightness metaphor.

Is Canonical creating a new generic “corporate identity” for Ubuntu inspired by light, as in Coke lite?

It had to happen I guess, what with the recent Canonical shake-up. IMHO the new thinner Ubuntu logo looks a lot like cheap corporate stationary and less like the fatter and blacker Linux distribution we all love.

Has Ubuntu as in ” Linux for Human Beings” been put on a diet  by designer Chris Jones  Are we about to see NoFuntu Fanta — Linux for Carbonated Soda Drinks? If  Ubuntu is a soft-drink it really deserves more CO2 bubbles.

I don’t get  the reasoning by Jones for not being uniquely relevant anymore: “Ubuntu is six, we have to stop playing with our crayons and grow up” is a piece of schtick if ever I saw one. “Playing with Ubuntu” is precisely why people turn to Ubuntu as an alternative OS. Goodness, do we all now have to fit everything into an Oracle Office vision of the world, in which nothing but productive clones exist, without any life purpose except to go to work?

Whatever happened to being human? Or being African and wholesome? Both black and brown are being  jettisoned, as we speak, in favour of outrageously unfashionable White and Orange.

Really now, the 1970s Orange Tang is so overdone as a design statement over the past decade, one might as well conceive of an OS from the Orange Free State or the former Transvaal. Think Cheesy as in sleazy. What next, fur on the desktop? Pimping Ubuntu is pretty sick, I guess.  I really hope the folks at Canonical wake up before they forget: Ubuntu will always be  a Community distribution based on Freedom, the four freedoms to be exact. Also Nelson Mandela’s Principle Number 1. Which is why Orange is the one crayon you have to be careful with. Black, Grey, Red, anything but the Big O on its own. As for the typface, you heard write, it’s a disaster from a monitor screen point of view, which is why I predict, those funky new letters will fatten up as practical issues such as visibility come into play.

Colours come and go, the typeface which made Ubuntu totally unique is an example of the playfulness in which the original design team appropriated pop-art with a style that will outlive today’s horrible thinness. In six-months nobody will remember the exact point size of the redesign. They will remember only that it was thin as opposed to fat and that fat always comes back, no matter what diet you on.

Alternative thin but still black choice

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